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Saturday, December 12, 2015

Regan Walker hosts Donna Hatch and the Bow Street Runners!

Hello all. It’s Regan Walker. Today I’m inviting you to get lost in Regency
England with my guest Donna Hatch and the Bow Street Runners. Donna is the author of the best-selling “Rogue
Hearts Series” and has won writing awards such as The Golden Quill and the
International Digital Award.

A hopeless romantic and adventurer at heart, she
discovered her writing passion at the tender age of 8 and has been listening to
those voices ever since. She has become a sought-after workshop presenter, and
juggles freelance editing, multiple volunteer positions, and most of all, her
six children. A native of Arizona who recently transplanted to the Pacific
Northwest, she and her husband of over twenty five years are living proof that
there really is a happily ever after.

The Bow
Street Runnersby Donna Hatch

Aside
from Robin Hood’s Merry Men, few other groups inspire the mystery and tragedy
of Bow Street Runners. Bow Street Runners were a unique and unprecedented
fighting force that paved the way for the modern police. They are also no
longer in existence, and we know very little about them. Hence the mystery. And
the tragedy.

Before their existence, there was no organized police in
London. During riots and other emergencies, British soldiers helped restore
peace. The rest of the time, untrained constables were charged with keeping law
and order in London. However, they failed to effectively protect the innocent
or bring justice to the guilty. Men in each district were supposed to make up The
Night Watch on a rotating basis, but most working class men wouldn’t or
couldn’t be up all night keeping watch. Besides, it was dangerous. So they
hired others to take their turn, often elderly men who needed the money because
they could no longer work. These night watchmen typically huddled in groups
around the nearest light and hoped no one would harass them. Needless to say,
they were too feeble to be much of a threat to a thief.

Therefore, the average citizen performed the majority of the
arrests. The citizen who’d been wronged had to gather all his own evidence,
perform the arrest, drag the person before the magistrate (judge) and convince
the magistrate this was the criminal. That person was basically the
investigator, policeman and lawyer all in one. A daunting task, to be sure. Since
the accused were considered guilty unless proven innocent, a guilty verdict
usually resulted.

Henry Fielding

Into
this ineffective chaos stepped the Fielding brothers. Henry Fielding was a
magistrate whose office was on Bow Street. In 1750, he and his brother organized
an elite fighting force of highly trained and disciplined young men known as
the Bow Street Runners. Later nicknamed the “Robins Redbreasts” for their
distinctive red waistcoats, they knew how to conduct investigations, including a rudimentary forensics,
and questioning witnesses and victims. They even carried handcuffs.

In the early years, there were only six Bow Street Runners
in London, and for some reason, that number was kept constant for a time. But
later, those numbers grew. There was even a Bow Street mounted patrol that
protected the highways from the dreaded and dangerous highwaymen. The patrol
changed the safety, and therefore nature, of travel.

While the office of a magistrate belonged exclusively to gentlemen of the
nobility or gentry, the Bow Street Runners were working class men. They were
smart, skilled and cunning, and hand-picked by the Fielding brothers. Though
they typically remained in the London area, there are accounts of them tracking
fugitives as far as the Scottish border. They drew a modest salary from Bow
Street, so most of their pay came in the form of a bounty or reward, usually
paid by the victim or a group that had a vested interest in solving the crime.
Runners could also be hired out to conduct special investigations, or act as
body guards. I have found no evidence of any foul play or bribes taken,
suggesting that they were men of honor and that they had a strong loyalty to
their magistrate.

Eventually, other magistrates followed the Fielding’s example, but none
achieved the acclaim of the Runners.

In 1830, when the new Metropolitan Police was organized, the Bow Street Runners
became obsolete. Later, the police came to be known as Scotland Yard. They
adopted most of their procedures from those developed by the Runners, and I can
only assume that many Runners became investigators for their replacement
organization.

In my Regency Romance, The Suspect’s
Daughter, book 4 of the Rogue Hearts Series, my hero Grant often helps the
Bow Street Runners with some of their cases. Even though he is the son of an
earl, he does this partly as a favor to his friend who is the Magistrate of Bow
Street, and partly because it feeds his thirst for danger.

The blurb for The Suspect’s Daughter:

Determined
to help her father with his political career, Jocelyn sets aside dreams of
love. When she meets the handsome and mysterious
Grant Amesbury, her dreams of true love reawaken. But his secrets put her
family in peril.

Grant goes undercover to capture conspirators avowed to
murder the prime minister, but his only suspect is the father of a courageous
lady who is growing increasingly hard to ignore. He can’t allow Jocelyn to
distract him from the case, nor will he taint her with his war-darkened soul.
She seems to see past the barriers surrounding his heart, which makes her all
the more dangerous to his vow of remaining forever alone.

Jocelyn will do anything to clear her father’s name, even
if that means working with Grant. Time is running out. The future of England
hangs in the balance...and so does their love.

The Suspect’s
Daughter is
available now for pre-order on Amazon. But to one lucky commenter on this post, Donna will give away a copy of her Regency Christmas novella, Mistletoe Magic.

Award-winning, #1 bestselling author of Georgian, Regency & Medieval romance: the Agents of the Crown, Medieval Warriors and holiday romances. Website: http://www.reganwalkerauthor.com/. She is also a top reviewer on both Amazon and Goodreads with 900 reviews, and her own Historical Romance Review blog, http://reganromancereview.blogspot.com/.